The intellectual definition or delimitation assigned to the "given" is thus as tentative and experimental as that ascribed to the idea. In form both are categorical, and in content both are hypothetical. Facts really exist just as facts, and meanings exist as meanings. One is no more superfluous, more subjective, or less necessitated than the other. In and of themselves as existences both are equally realistic and compulsive. But on the basis of existence, there is no element in either which may be strictly described as intellectual or cognitional. There is only a practical situation in its brute and unrationalized form. What is uncertain about the facts as given at any moment is whether the right exclusions and selections have been made. Since that is a question which can be decided finally only by the experimental issue, this ascription of character is itself tentative and experimental. If it works, the characterization and delineation are found to be proper ones; but every admission prior to inquiry, of unquestioned, categorical, rigid objectivity, compromises the probability that it will work. The character assigned to the datum must be taken as hypothetically as possible in order to preserve the elasticity needed for easy and prompt reconsideration. Any other procedure virtually insists that all facts and details anywhere happening to exist and happening to present themselves (all being equally real) must all be given equal status and equal weight, and that their outer ramifications and internal complexities must be indefinitely followed up. The worthlessness of this sheer accumulation of realities, its total irrelevancy, the lack of any way of judging the significance of the accumulations, are good proofs of the fallacy of any theory which ascribes objective logical content to facts wholly apart from the needs and possibilities of a situation.
The more stubbornly one maintains the full reality of either his facts or his ideas, just as they stand, the more accidental is the discovery of relevantly significant facts and of valid ideas—the more accidental, the less rational, is the issue of the knowledge situation. Due progress is reasonably probable in just the degree in which the meaning, categorical in its existing imperativeness, and the fact, equally categorical in its brute coerciveness, are assigned only a provisional and tentative nature with reference to control of the situation. That this surrender of a rigid and final character for the content of knowledge on the sides both of fact and of meaning, in favor of experimental and functioning estimations, is precisely the change which has marked the development of modern from mediaeval and Greek science, seems undoubted. To learn the lesson one has only to contrast the rigidity of phenomena and conceptions in Greek thought (Platonic ideas, Aristotelian forms) with the modern experimental selection and determining of facts and experimental employment of hypotheses. The former have ceased to be ultimate realities of a nondescript sort and have become provisional data; the latter have ceased to be eternal meanings and have become working theories. The fruitful application of mathematics and the evolution of a technique of experimental inquiry have coincided with this change. That realities exist independently of their use as intellectual data, and that meanings exist apart from their utilization as hypotheses, are the permanent truths of Greek realism as against the exaggerated subjectivism of modern philosophy; but the conception that this existence is to be defined in the same way as are contents of knowledge, so that perfect being is object of perfect knowledge and imperfect being object of imperfect knowledge, is the fallacy which Greek thought projected into modern. Science has advanced in its methods in just the degree in which it has ceased to assume that prior realities and prior meanings retain fixedly and finally, when entering into reflective situations, the characters they had prior to this entrance, and in which it has realized that their very presence within the knowledge situation signifies that they have to be redefined and revalued from the standpoint of the new situation.
IV
This conception does not, however, commit us to the view that there is any conscious situation which is totally non-reflective. It may be true that any experience which can properly be termed such comprises something which is meant over and against what is given or there. But there are many situations into which the rational factor—the mutual distinction and mutual reference of fact and meaning—enters only incidentally and is slurred, not accentuated. Many disturbances are relatively trivial and induce only a slight and superficial redefinition of contents. This passing tension of facts against meaning may suffice to call up and carry a wide range of meaningful facts which are quite irrelevant to the intellectual problem. Such is the case where the individual is finding his way through any field which is upon the whole familiar, and which, accordingly, requires only an occasional resurvey and revaluation at moments of slight perplexity. We may call these situations, if we will, knowledge situations (for the reflective function characteristic of knowledge is present), but so denominating them does not do away with their sharp difference from those situations in which the critical qualification of facts and definition of meanings constitute the main business. To speak of the passing attention which a traveler has occasionally to give to the indications of his proper path in a fairly familiar and beaten highway as knowledge, in just the same sense in which the deliberate inquiry of a mathematician or a chemist or a logician is knowledge, is as confusing to the real issue involved as would be the denial to it of any reflective factor. If, then, one bears in mind these two considerations—(1) the unique problem and purpose of every reflective situation, and (2) the difference as to range and thoroughness of logical function in different types of reflective situations—one need have no difficulty with the doctrine that the great obstacle in the development of scientific knowing is that facts and meanings enter such situations with stubborn and alien characteristics imported from other situations.
This affords an opportunity to speak again of the logical problem to which reference and promise of return were made earlier in this paper. Facts may be regarded as existing qualitatively and in certain spatial and temporal relations; when there is knowledge another relation is added, that of one thing meaning or signifying another. Water exists, for example, as water, in a certain place, in a certain temporal sequence. But it may signify the quenching of thirst; and this signification-relation constitutes knowledge.[57] This statement may be taken in a way congruous with the account developed in this paper. But it may also be taken in another sense, consideration of which will serve to enforce the point regarding the tentative nature of the characterization of the given, as distinct from the intended and absent. Water means quenching thirst; it is drunk, and death follows. It was not water, but a poison which "looked like" water. Or it is drunk, and is water, but does not quench thirst, for the drinker is in an abnormal condition and drinking water only intensifies the thirst. Or it is drunk and quenches thirst; but it also brings on typhoid fever, being not merely water, but water plus germs. Now all these events demonstrate that error may appertain quite as much to the characterization of existing things, suggesting or suggested, as to the suggestion qua suggestion. There is no ground for giving the "things" any superior reality. In these cases, indeed, it may fairly be said that the mistake is made because qualitative thing and suggested or meaning-relation were not discriminated. The "signifying" force was regarded as a part of the direct quality of the given fact, quite as much as its color, liquidity, etc.; it is only in another situation that it is discriminated as a relation instead of being regarded as an element.
It is quite as true to say that a thing is called water because it suggests thirst-quenching as to say that it suggests thirst-quenching because it is characterized as water. The knowledge function becomes prominent or dominant in the degree in which there is a conscious discrimination between the fact-relations and the meaning-relations. And this inevitably means that the "water" ceases to be surely water, just as it becomes doubtful or hypothetical whether this thing, whatever it is, really means thirst-quenching. If it really means thirst-quenching, it is water; so far as it may not mean it, it perhaps is not water. It is now just as much a question what this is as what it means. Whatever will resolve one question will resolve the other. In just the degree, then, in which an existence or thing gets intellectualized force or function, it becomes a fragmentary and dubious thing, to be circumscribed and described for the sake of operating as sign, or clue of a future reality to be realized through action. Only as "reality" is reduced to a sign, and questions of its nature as sign are considered, does it get intellectual or cognitional status. The bearing of this upon the question of practical character of the distinctions of fact and idea is obvious. No one, I take it, would deny that action of some sort does follow upon judgment; no one would deny that this action does somehow serve to test the value of the intellectual operations upon which it follows. But if this subsequent action is merely subsequent, if the intellectual categories, operations, and distinctions are complete in themselves, without inherent reference to it, what guaranty is there that they pass into relevant action, and by what miracle does the action manage to test the worth of the idea? But if the intellectual identification and description of the thing are as tentative and instrumental as is the ascription of significance, then the exigencies of the active situation are operative in all the categories of the knowledge situation. Action is not a more or less accidental appendage or afterthought, but is undergoing development and giving direction in the entire knowledge function.
In conclusion, I remark that the ease with which the practical character of these fundamental logical categories, fact, meaning, and agreement, may be overlooked or denied is due to the organic way in which practical import is incarnate in them. It can be overlooked because it is so involved in the terms themselves that it is assumed at every turn. The pragmatist is in the position of one who is charged with denying the existence of something because, in pointing out a certain fundamental feature of it, he puts it in a strange light. Such confusion always occurs when the familiar is brought to definition. The difficulties are more psychological—difficulties of orientation and mental adjustment—than logical, and in the long run will be done away with by our getting used to the different viewpoint, rather than by argument.